Post-election celebrations erupted in the streets of Budapest over the weekend after Hungarian voters ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orban after 16 years, handing pro-EU opposition leader Peter Magyar a supermajority and depriving Moscow of its closest friend inside NATO.
However, the challenge of Russian electoral interference in Europe is not over. Instead, it is shifting east to Bulgaria, which on April 19 will hold its eighth round of parliamentary elections since 2021.
Russian influence in Bulgaria doesn’t arrive in tanks — it seeps in through cracks in the system. Corruption, weak institutions, and captured media have left the country unusually susceptible to Kremlin-backed networks spanning politics, business, and energy.
MAGYAR DEMANDS HUNGARIAN PRESIDENT STEP DOWN OR ELSE BE REMOVED BY FORCE
Civil upheaval in late 2025 forced the resignation of former Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov after protests over a contested state budget grew into a larger movement against corruption in the country’s two largest pro-European parties, the right-wing GERB and the centrist DPS-New Beginnings. The discrediting of both those factions opened a political window of opportunity for former president Rumen Radev, who is leading in the polls.
A former commander of the Bulgarian Air Force, Radev had served as the country’s president since 2017 until he resigned abruptly in January 2026. He now leads a center-left coalition, Progressive Bulgaria, and is an ally of Orban and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić.
Despite having received professional military education in the United States, Radev is a Eurosceptic who has opposed military aid to Ukraine, recognized Crimea as Russian, and argued Bulgaria should renew relations with Moscow. Russian state media has already ordained him the “New Orban,” celebrating his rise as proof that pro-Russian dissidence inside the EU is far from over.
While the political conditions that enabled Radev’s rise are real, some of the forces supporting his candidacy are not entirely organic.
A recent report from the Balkan Free Media Initiative and the media monitoring company Sensika indicates that much of Radev’s support on social media appears to involve coordinated fake accounts and targeted posting to fabricate grassroots momentum. The analysis found that TikTok hashtags supporting Radev’s candidacy were spreading 20 to 60 times faster than those of his rivals. Meanwhile, pro-Radev Facebook groups are growing and generating posts at a suspiciously fast pace and purchased pages with no prior political activity have suddenly started supporting the former president.
The actor behind this activity is unconfirmed. But it matches the playbook Russia has employed to meddle in elections around the world, most recently in Hungary, Romania, and Moldova. Tellingly, Bulgaria’s lame-duck government has appealed to the EU for help in identifying and stopping foreign election interference through social media and propaganda websites. In March, Sofia, one of the EU’s worst-prepared members against this sort of threat, also took the belated step of establishing a temporary Foreign Ministry unit to combat external meddling. And in recent weeks, authorities have detained over 200 people in a crackdown on vote-buying and coercion.
Radev, for his part, accuses Sofia and Brussels of pursuing the “Romanian model,” a reference to the Romanian Constitutional Court’s controversial decision in 2024 to annul a far-right candidate’s presidential victory amid evidence of widespread Russian interference. Pro-Kremlin media is amplifying this narrative, dismissing documented interference as fiction and insisting the real interferers are Brussels and Washington.
Orban’s removal eliminated Russia’s most reliable institutional obstacle to EU and NATO support for Ukraine. Moscow’s influence machine is now working to replace that.
Although Brussels is already working with Sofia to safeguard the upcoming elections, Washington should pitch in, too. The goal should be to thwart meddling now, not after the votes are counted.
AMERICANS SHOULDN’T CRY FOR ORBAN
First, the United States can share intelligence on foreign influence operations with Bulgarian and EU counterparts. Second, Washington can provide election cybersecurity expertise through NATO’s Counter-Hybrid Support Teams, which can provide on-the-ground assistance in Sofia. And after the election, Washington and Brussels could jointly sanction the individuals and entities orchestrating interference, demonstrating unity and informing the public about the foreign threat.
Magyar’s victory in Hungary proved that democratic resilience is still possible after years of backsliding. Moscow may have lost ground in Budapest, but in Sofia, it is already probing for its next opening. If the West is serious about denying Russia a foothold inside the EU and NATO, it cannot afford to look away now.
Reagan Easter is a senior communications associate at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. She previously worked with Homeland Security Investigations and holds a degree in International Affairs from The George Washington University. Ivana Stradner serves as a research fellow with FDD’s Barish Center for Media Integrity. She studies Russia’s security strategies and military doctrines to understand how Russia uses information operations for strategic communication. Follow FDD on X @FDD. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focused on national security and foreign policy.